So the Finals are over, and all I have to say is: thank fucking god. It was like sitting through the longest goddamn page turn ever, except while also knowing what was coming next the entire time, thus leaving you in a complete state of agony from the wait-time.

I wrote tangentially about the Finals in my previous piece, and I had initially wanted to follow that up with this as a supplement to that, but knowing the reactionary engine that is the Internet and modern society would likely take the additional bits as some sort of retraction, I held off until now. I also didn’t have everything I wanted to say sussed out so that it wouldn’t sound like a completely incoherent rant that dives into sanity and being reasonable on occasion like the previous piece. I guess this will still be a supplemental/continuation of that article, but it’s not going to be as completely off-the-rails (I hope), nor does it mean I’m retracting what I said before; I completely stand by that tirade and what was said, even if it was a total fucking train wreck. Sometimes you have to go off the rails in order to lay down better track later on. Anyways, let’s get on with this.

I Still Don’t Like the Golden State Warriors

I’m opening with this to hammer the nail into the coffin for anyone who thinks I was lying before, I’ve had a change of heart, or I’m trying to soften the previous blow. Make no mistake: I don’t like that ball club in Oakland. I said before that I didn’t like them way before their explosion into popularity, and that is true. When you suck for four decades, then catch an extremely lucky break to your first title in forever, only to follow it up by getting an inflated ego despite trying to portray the exact opposite and claiming so vocally, I think it’s a fair take to say, ‘Yeah, I don’t like that.’ I completely understand where an ego would come from, and the atmosphere that would come from your squad turning a pile of shit into a bar of gold, especially in a place like California where substance takes the back-back seat of the van to semblance. That doesn’t mean I can get behind it or enjoy it. If some random person were being an arrogant dick, you have full rights and capability to call them out on it. That doesn’t mean, however, that said random person has to stop being a dick, just like their behavior doesn’t have to be something you support.

Honestly, if the fan-base had a tighter grip on itself and did some self-policing to rightfully amputate the festering wound of rabid flag-waving & stupidity that is obviously infecting it so that it would be able to take valid criticisms in stride, I likely would’ve buried the hatchet years ago. Until that happens, the axe will ride the grindstone.

Childish Behaviors

For all that I said previously, I didn’t really even touch on what you could call the team’s ‘antics’. I know the colloquial term would be ‘celebrations’, and perhaps it’s just me, but I wouldn’t call what the Dubs do ‘celebrations’. I don’t get the shimmying, I don’t get the dancing, I don’t get the high leg kicks; I just don’t get it. The party line is usually, ‘They’re having fun’, but I don’t see any other team doing the same things, so does that mean no other team is having fun? Are high-five lines not fun? Are lion-esque roars after nasty slam dunks or being on fire lame? I’m sure some of what bothers me is how frequent it is. I could get behind it if it were something that happened when a guy was on fire or on a game-winning shot or in response to making a run after being down by a lot and thus clawing back into the game, but it happens on nearly every single run the Warriors make. I could also get behind it if people dropped the ‘they’re just having fun’ nonsense and simply accepted it was a little douche-y, because it is. I mean, everyone accepts J.R. Smith’s ridiculous celebrations for the crazy shots he hits as both hysterical and kind of douche-y, so why not this? Plus, I still just can’t wrap my head around the idea that the Warriors are the only ones on the court having fun because of the antics; it just seems preposterous that only 3% of the league is enjoying playing basketball.

On the flip-side, I also don’t like/understand the inordinate amount of pouting they do whenever the team plays bad or they lose a game. I remember back when they had the shot to break the regular season win streak record, then lost to Milwaukee, and the team was crying. Why? You didn’t lose the Finals. You didn’t see a friend die on the court. Man, you didn’t even get injured bad enough to end your season. Even if it was a ‘dream’, it wasn’t like it was on the bucket list of anyone on the team until they realized it was a possibility, so the notion of being that emotionally invested into it enough to actually cry just kind of blows my mind, and it spits in the face of the team being all about ‘having fun’. A team all about ‘having fun’ would’ve probably just taken it in stride. As an aside, I hate how the Warriors are listed as holding the second longest regular season win streak, despite it being split over two separate seasons. Even though I’m bringing it up for the Warriors, I can’t stand it in any context for any team. When the regular season ends for that year, that’s it, yet when it was favorable to the Warriors to include the ass-end of the previous season, the precedent was thrown the fuck out. Why the fuck is a team that acts kind of douche-y and looks like a gaggle of sad Kermits when they lose allowed to have the rules bent for them? I know it’s a Wikipedia page and Wikipedia is taken care of by idiots, but fuck you, Wikipedia. The seasons are separate for a goddamn reason; the media made that fucking ’28 games’ narrative so that bandwagoning Californians would generate them a ton of click-bait money. The streak is 24, fuck you.

The Kevin Durant Debacle

Even though I brought it up before, it’s taken a lot of mental sojourning to nail down what I believe is the core of the Kevin Durant signing backlash. Make no mistake, I still think it was a bad move that has the potential to completely ruin the sport due to lack of competition, and that the smart thing to do would’ve been for Adam Silver to step in and nix it like David Stern nixed Chris Paul going to the Lakers. However, what’s done is done, and Adam Silver has been saying that he thinks the league is doing fine and should catch up to Golden State, so uncompetitive regular seasons seem to be the status quo going foward; you do you, Commissioner, even if I think you’re pants-on-head retarded and quite possibly have no idea about the very sport you effectively govern.

Anyways, what always iced me about the Kevin Durant signing wasn’t the signing itself, it was everything that surrounded the signing. Unfortunately, because of how high profile the move was, along with fans/the public being muppets who seem to be incapable of nuanced thought and are only capable of furiously waving flags, talking about the timeline of events was always torpedoed by both sides simply because the person talking hadn’t explicitly chosen a side. It honestly felt like the whole alternative right/radical left that’s going on with politics, but even more moronic. Since the timeline is so crucial to understanding the backlash, let’s walk through it, event by event.

The Thunder make the Western Conference Finals, but get bounced by the Spurs in six games, who then go on to win the whole shebang. Durant again plays below his level, but no big deal because he’s won the 2014 MVP and the organization bends over backwards to pick up players to help make the team capable in the paint and beyond the arc, which allows Durant to play the style of basketball he loves. He then goes down in the off-season, and rides the pine the whole 14-15 season because he keeps trying to play on a hurt foot, which is stupid considering how many small bones and ligaments make up a foot and how even small changes can keep the appendage from working properly. This year is important because Durant later mentions that it changed his outlook and brought about an epiphany of how important being healthy and staying healthy is. The Thunder crush it in the 15-16 season, and rock through the playoffs. The team loses, however, in the Western Conference Finals again (perhaps a pattern) when Durant proceeds to shit the bed and play extremely poorly in the back half of the series, despite holding a 3-1 lead on the Warriors and blowing them out multiple times, both on the Warriors home court. Of course, this gets completely forgotten once the Warriors choke away the Finals that year, but both these events push Durant and the Warriors together.

At the start of the off-season prior to the 16-17 regular season, Durant goes dark and says nothing to anyone. He then signs with the Warriors, and Oklahoma City, along with the rest of the league, is shocked and upset. As soon as he gets to California, he begins to spam his social media with praise of the state, the city, his time with the team, yada, yada, yada. He also takes the time to fire some shots at the Thunder, including the players and the organization on the whole. It’s later found out that he never contacted Russell Westbrook, who he had spent the last two season praising and adamantly defending from the sports media who made it their mission to constantly shit on Westbrook and try and create a narrative of how Westbrook cannot possibly coexist with Durant; ironically, this narrative gets stronger when Durant leaves. Durant also hires someone to write ‘The Hardest Road’, a long-form essay explaining his reasoning for the move, how difficult his choice is when contextualized as choosing to enter unfamiliar territory rather than stay in a much more comfortable zone, and a complete ape of LeBron James’ ‘I’m Coming Home’ long-form essay from the prior year. The off-season continues with both Durant and Westbrook taking tiny pot-shots at each other, with the media salivating over the fued. The Warriors run train on the regular season, despite seemingly lacking chemistry, and catch an extremely lucky break again come playoff time, as they once again do not face a remote challenge due to their opposition being riddled with injuries until the Finals, which they win 4-1 over Cleveland.

With the history lesson out of the way, there are many different narratives that came out of the saga. ‘Why did he leave?’ ‘How will this affect the NBA?’ ‘This cannot possibly be fair!’ ‘Fuck KD!’ ‘Fuck the Warriors!’ ‘Great, now the regular season sucks even more!’ are some of the most prevalent, but there were as many narratives as branches on a hundred-year old oak. Some of these obvious ones I’ve already talked about at length; I’ve stated that I don’t think the move was healthy for the league, despite how many people end up watching the Finals, and that no amount of won rings will ever erase this from the NBA history books for both Durant and this Warriors squad, especially when future generations come in and scrutinize this era while those of us living now will simply yell at them angrily for ‘daring to question greatness’ as a coping mechanism for protecting our nostalgia.

What I haven’t talked about until now is, as already mentioned, the timeline of events and why I find it baffling that people are perfectly okay with it. I mentioned in my last piece that my main gripe with everything from this last year of basketball is just how mediocre it was. Having watched for nearly three decades almost religiously, this year was unequivocally the lowest in terms of time spent watching games. Not only did I tune out of more games this year than before, but I hardly dual/multi-viewed games that happened on the same night at time-slots that overlapped. In previous seasons, I always watched multiple game streams to the point that I set up one of the handful of web browsers I have specifically for watching NBA games. Towards the end of the season, I stopped watching altogether, because I didn’t care. The knowledge of the Cavs-Warriors Finals, a fact which was known from day one of the regular season, loomed like the shadow of a mountain over the regular season, and effectively ruined the most competitive part of the season since there was no doubt that the competition wouldn’t stack up. The formality of the regular season and part of the playoffs, along with the continuously dropping quality of the refereeing during the games, had me constantly questioning (and still does) if I even wanted to continue watching despite the viewing opportunity being a click away; if Sahltines doesn’t even want to click a link, then you’re definitely in a bad spot.

A massive part of the mediocrity was, obviously, how stacked the Warriors were. Nobody doubted they were going to lose the trophy, despite the sentiment during the Finals and all of the re-treading people have done since then. If the issue had simply been a stacked team beating up on the rest of the league and being over-joyous in doing so, I can get past that, and indeed have; after all, the Warriors did it last year, so the fix is avoiding discussions/circlejerking about the team and not watching the games. This was unfortunately made impossible because of all the bickering over the Kevin Durant move that put tons of hot air into the atmosphere, but never added any depth to the conversation. So what, pray tell, is this mystical ‘core’ of the problem I keep hacking on about?

The core is: Why? ‘But Sahltines, that’s so vague and simple, that can’t be it!’ Fair enough; it’s my job to expound upon this.

Why is Kevin Durant now saying in interviews about how happy he is and that the happiest moment was when he showed up at Oakland and didn’t have to be a vocal leader? The only logical answer that comes from this is he never said anything about this during his time in OKC. That then begs the question: why? If the desire to not hold the weight of the team’s vocal leader was that big of a deal to him, why was it never brought up in his near-decade of time spent in Oklahoma? Why say this now after throwing shade on his former team and organization, who bent over backwards to get him players that would benefit his play-style and who spent hours working to become better players, playmakers & defenders so that Durant wouldn’t have to carry so much of the load?

Speaking in that view of throwing OKC under the bus, why did he choose to do that and why has he never directly addressed it? Even if you toss out the ramifications of the decision to leave OKC, that doesn’t mean all of the aftermath and ripple effects go away because much of those were caused by his actions and statements once he moved to Oakland. Why didn’t he talk to the Thunder organization or the players or Westbrook before he left? Why is his decision to cold shoulder them all completely ignored? Why has nobody from any camp addressed how poorly Durant handled this decision?

Most importantly out of all of this, why in the fuck are people perfectly okay with a man acting in a way that only makes for someone half his age to act? The whole debacle was a goddamn high-school break-up, complete with unnecessary, pointless tension, passive aggressive pot-shots, and obnoxious & emotionally charged bickering whenever they saw each other. I know it’s redundant to say, but seriously, why the fuck is this okay?!

Throughout the regular season, a pervasive statement was ‘KD is a bitch’. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with this statement because it assumes a lot of the man and his character that you can find video, written and quoted evidence to the contrary. However, just because someone isn’t a bitch at their core doesn’t mean they can’t pull a bitch move, and that’s exactly what happened. Continuing to come up short, effectively proving that old ‘Mr. Unreliable’ story to be true is one thing. Joining the best team in the league that you just choked against because you want a championship, but don’t have the wherewithal or mental fortitude to lead a team to one is one thing, even if it feels dirty and cheap. You know what isn’t ‘one thing’? Holing yourself up in your room, not talking to the people you called friends for nearly the last decade, talking shit after you move, paying some sucker to write an essay for you about it being ‘the hardest road to take’, despite the goddamn fact you constantly go on about how comfortable and friendly everything in Oakland is, and then running train on the league with a bravado and arrogance that you’ve never displayed before that effectively solidifies the idea in players & fans minds that the Golden State Warriors are cocky, showoff-y knob gobblin’ goblins.

Quick tangent: I find it hysterical that Durant took so much offense to the “Mr. Unreliable’ article years back, and now he’s come out and said he never wanted to be a leader, which was the main point of the article. I also find ‘The Hardest Road’ hysterical not only for the above mentioned fact that he’s gone on record as saying he always felt comfortable in Oakland, but for the fact that people just ate it up despite it making no goddamn sense in any context.

You know, if Durant would just own up to the fact that the whole off-season last year was not handled well and that some of the stuff he said and did had to do with that, I bet my hat collection that nobody would still be talking about him going to Golden State. There wouldn’t be a grey area to speculate on; the lines would’ve been drawn in the sand. He won’t, though, because he would have done so by now, and that’s what boils my blood about this non-troversy.

People, including Kevin Durant and, to a lesser extent, Golden State, think that simply winning rings wipes the record clean and washes away past transgressions. It doesn’t. Look at mother-fucking Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Jordan is routinely criticized for being psychotically driven to be the best, as it left him an extremely petty asshole who could never handle being second place at anything. Nobody lets Kobe live down how him and Shaq never got along, or when the Lakers were mediocre during the 2000s and he publicly stated he hated it and that he wanted to be traded. Hell, people give LeBron shit for The Decision still, an event that, while a complete eyesore and stupid move, ended up raising a shit-ton of money for charities and philanthropies. Why are these objective greats of the basketball world run through the ringer, yet another objective great in Kevin Durant is given a free goddamn pass to be a massive fucking cunt to people he once called friends?

Perhaps I’ve been too harsh and over the top on all this, but that honestly doesn’t matter. What matters is that the general sentiment is one of apathy and acceptance of mediocrity and shitty behavior for the trade of being drip-fed entertainment in Vine-length intervals. I get that not everyone is as put off as I am by a major icon acting like a petulant, spoiled child, and that realization is the most disheartening thing out of all of this.